Martin McPhilimey - School of Breath Science

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Martin McPhilimey - School of Breath Science

🧠 Helping coaches build clinical-grade breath, sleep & nervous system skills.

I’m Martin McPhilimey, a respiratory and sleep scientist, educator, coach, and founder of the School of Breath Science. My work sits at the intersection of breathing science, sleep, nervous system regulation, stress resilience, and human performance. With over 15 years of experience across respiratory and sleep science, clinical practice, education, and applied coaching, I help individuals and pro

fessionals better understand how the body works — and how to use that understanding to improve health, wellbeing, and performance. Through my consulting and educational work, I support people in building stress resilience, improving sleep, regulating the nervous system, and developing practical tools to feel calmer, clearer, and more capable in everyday life. Through the School of Breath Science, I train coaches, breathwork facilitators, health professionals, and practitioners to apply breathwork and breath training safely, intelligently, and effectively using evidence-informed frameworks. My mission is to raise the standard of breathwork education by bringing together science, practical coaching, and a deep respect for the human experience. Whether you are here to improve your own health, deepen your understanding of breath and the nervous system, or become a more confident practitioner, you are very welcome here.

23/08/2026

A new study on people with hyperventilation syndrome suggests something quite different from what is often taught in functional breathing pop science.

The reality is that the evidence behind some of the strongest claims in this space is surprisingly limited.

That is one of the differences between science and marketing.

Science builds understanding slowly. It deals in uncertainty, competing explanations and accumulating evidence.

Pop science tends to turn that uncertainty into something concrete, simple and marketable.

This paper is a good example. Hyperventilation syndrome appears to involve multiple layers of breathing physiology, perception and behaviour. Reducing it to “poor CO₂ tolerance” may be attractive because it gives people a simple problem and, conveniently, a method to sell as the solution.

The nuance isn’t as s*xy. It probably won’t scale as quickly either.

But learning the nuance changes how you think, assess and work with people.

That is how we raise the standard of this industry.

If you want to work at that level, I’m with you.

19/08/2026

How many times have you had someone say, “But it’s just breathing”?

In less than 50 seconds, I’ve given you plenty of reasons why it’s anything but.

Now imagine what someone could understand if they gave you 30–60 minutes to explain it properly.

Breathing is simple. The science behind it isn’t.

Share this with your community and help people understand that there’s a lot more to breathing than “just breathing.”

18/08/2026

The idea that mouth breathing is the cause of overbreathing is an oversimplification that can send us looking in the wrong place.

Chronic mouth breathing can be an issue. It may be habitual, but it can also reflect nasal obstruction, airway disease, or structural factors that need attention.

But context matters.

Opening your mouth during hard exercise doesn’t automatically mean you’re overbreathing.

Breathing through the mouth when stressed doesn’t automatically mean the mouth caused the change in ventilation.

The breathing route is not the same as respiratory drive.

Breathing is adaptive. Rate and depth are continuously regulated by metabolic, chemical, behavioural, and emotional demands via brainstem and higher brain networks.

So if we only focus on the mouth, we risk missing what’s happening upstream.

Think of someone exhausted, highly stressed, sleeping poorly, and in a constant state of arousal.

If we say, “Your problem is mouth breathing,” we may be ignoring the bigger picture that’s driving the pattern.

Nasal breathing, mechanics, and breath practices can all help.

But if that’s where the assessment stops, we’re only seeing one part of a much larger system.

Because breathing retraining alone is unlikely to resolve the underlying stressors, behaviours, and environmental factors involved.

Breathing is both an input to and output of the nervous system.

That shifts the question from:

“How do I make this person breathe correctly?”

to:

“Why are they breathing this way in the first place?”

That’s where breathwork education needs to go.

If you’re interested in getting to root causes and using integrated behavioural coaching for lasting change, we have two spots left in our upcoming Breath Science Certification.

Comment GROUP and I’ll send you the details.

17/08/2026

As the body relaxes and we transition into sleep, conscious behavioural control of breathing falls away. Breathing typically becomes slower, more regular and increasingly governed by automatic respiratory control.

At this point, chemoreceptor feedback becomes particularly important. Small changes in CO₂ and pH help regulate ventilation while the conscious influences that shape breathing during wakefulness are reduced.

This makes the emerging research around mild inspired CO₂ particularly interesting. Could carefully controlled increases in CO₂ interact with respiratory control, arousal and the transition into sleep in a way that supports sleep onset or sleep stability?

The answer is unlikely to be the same for everyone.

Responses to CO₂ can vary substantially depending on factors such as anxiety, ventilatory chemosensitivity, baseline CO₂, respiratory control stability, s*x hormones and individual physiology.

So this is not evidence that “CO₂ improves sleep” across the board. It is an interesting physiological signal that deserves considerably more investigation.

With larger samples, better phenotyping and replication, this line of research could potentially have relevance for understanding, and perhaps eventually treating, certain forms of sleep-disordered breathing or sleep disturbance.

An interesting study, but much more data is needed.

Share this with anyone interested in respiratory physiology, sleep science or CO₂-based therapies.

16/08/2026

The secret to success isn’t really much of a secret.

It’s being better at what you do, being able to demonstrate that with confidence, getting results for people, and allowing testimonials and word of mouth to do a lot of the heavy lifting.

I don’t really market my coaching and consulting anymore, yet I still get referred clients from people working with complex cases where they’ve only been able to make limited progress. Some of those referrals come from big names in the space.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that the people who become most successful after my training or mentorships are usually the ones who fully immerse themselves in the learning.

They start applying it immediately.

They share what they’re learning.

They talk about client wins.

They build confidence through repetition.

And importantly, they take what they’ve learnt and start expressing it in their own voice.

Because you can’t keep saying the same thing as everyone else and expect to stand out.

You need to nasal breathe.

You need to build CO2 tolerance.

You need more Wim Hof Method.

If that’s the extent of your message, why would someone come to you when they can learn the method directly from the source, or even find it for free on YouTube?

What people are really paying for is your thinking.

Your ability to assess.

Your judgement.

Your ability to make sense of complexity.

Your confidence in knowing what matters, what doesn’t, and what to do next.

And they’re paying for proximity to that.

That is what people are willing to pay good money for.

That’s ultimately what the Breath Science Certification is designed to build.

Not another practitioner repeating methods, scripts or talking points, but someone who can think for themselves, work with greater depth, communicate with confidence and develop an approach that becomes recognisably their own.

Because the goal isn’t simply to know more about breathing.

It’s to become the person others trust when the simple answers stop working.

If that’s the level of practitioner you want to become, message me “BSC” and I’ll send you the details.

15/08/2026

Seven years ago, I realised that if I kept seeing my parents at the same rate I had since moving to Australia, I might see them fewer than ten more times in my life.

That hit hard.

At the time I was working full-time as a clinical respiratory and sleep scientist. Most evenings, I’d come home to my little one-bedroom unit, set up my laptop, microphone and camera, and start creating.

I saved what I could and invested it back into an idea that barely existed.

A podcast became a YouTube channel. Then a website, ebook, webinars, workshops, coaching enquiries, failures, successes, testimonials and opportunities I never expected.

Eventually, someone paid me more than $1,500 to teach a one-hour workshop.

In 2021, I left my permanent clinical role and went all in.

Eighteen months later, the business had reached its first six-figure year.

Then in 2023, people started asking me to mentor them. Before long, I was at capacity and the business grew fourfold in a year.

That mentorship became a course.

The course became a community.

And that community forced me to think much bigger about what professional breath education should actually look like.

Scientific rigour. Scope of practice. Safeguarding. Assessment. Procedures. Competencies. Workbooks. Coaching frameworks. Mentorship. Professional standards.

That became the School of Breath Science | Practitioner Training

This month, I start the 13th and 14th cohorts of the Breath Science Certification, a professional training I’ve spent the last three years building.

What started with a laptop in a tiny apartment because I wanted more freedom to see the people I loved has grown into something I could never have mapped out at the beginning.

And strangely, it still feels like the beginning.

There is so much more I want to build, improve and contribute to this profession.

Seven years later, the vision is much bigger.

But the reason I started still matters just as much.

Build meaningful work. Do it properly. And create a life that gives you more time with the people who matter.

11/08/2026

I get a lot of people querying my training who’ve done a breathwork facilitator course and tell me they’ve already covered a lot of what I teach.

And to some extent, that can be true. Although I’m confident it’s the clinical depth that’s often missing from elsewhere.

But here’s the thing: I’m not teaching facilitation. That’s its own path. What I’m talking about is what it takes to become a Breath Science Practitioner.

Our 7-9,month professional training at the School of Breath Science | Practitioner Training is a genuinely different role. A structured coaching process — integrative behavioural coaching combined with evidence-based applied psychophysiology and clinical-grade reasoning.

The scope of practice is different. The competencies, the learning objectives, the implementation, the application. The systems, frameworks and thinking. All different.

If you’ve done a breathwork course, or a functional breathing training like Buteyko or Oxygen Advantage — this is a different thing entirely. Not better than what you’ve done. Different, and built for a different kind of work.

The clearest way I can show you what that difference actually looks like is a story. One client. The same ninety minutes. Two completely different approaches — and only one of them changed anything.

Comment DOOR and I’ll send you the full write-up.

10/08/2026

In a coaching call today, one of my clients said he felt as if he was off track.

Yet it was glaringly obvious to me that he was still on track, because the goal hadn’t changed, but the plan had.

So I called him up on it.

We explored the difference between feeling like you’re going backwards and actually moving away from what matters.

Because those are not always the same thing.

You can still be moving towards the life you want — the work, the relationships, the things you value — while the route becomes messier, harder and different from what you expected.

For me, this is often a point in life where you’re being asked to level up.

A perspective I hold is that when you go after the things you truly want, you’ll be challenged. There will be resistance. I see some of that as God asking you to prove: Is this what you truly want?

In the session, there was a useful shift.

The fearful tension was:

“What if this doesn’t work out?”

The reframe towards creative tension was:

“What can I influence right now?”

We discussed the conversations, boundaries, deadlines and different decisions available to him — while accepting that the original plan no longer needs to be the plan moving forward.

We then used breath and somatic work to help consolidate those shifts beyond simply understanding them intellectually.

The reflection afterwards was simple:

“The vision can remain intact without requiring the path to be perfect.”

Create from where you are now.

09/08/2026

Opening a door and walking someone home are two different things.

Julien had a breakthrough in a breathwork session. It didn’t make things better. It made them worse.

In my latest piece, I walk through what happens when a breathwork facilitator first meets someone, and what happens when a breath science practitioner meets that same person.

Same ninety minutes. Two completely different approaches. Only one of them started getting results.

Comment DOOR below and I’ll send you the full piece.

05/08/2026

The data is now coming in from the first clients completing case studies through the Breath Resilience Instructor Training—and this is worth celebrating.

Solid work from SJ | Trading, Business & The human experience

Across eight sessions, this client showed:

64% reduction in psychological distress
104% improvement in state wellbeing
48% increase in resting HRV
63% improvement in respiratory control

Progress was not perfectly linear. A reported stressor around Session 5 created a temporary setback, but the practitioner recognised it, adapted the process and continued supporting improvement.

This is not about producing a temporary state change or relying on a testimonial. Trainees are learning to track subjective, psychological and physiological change over time, then adapt the framework to the person in front of them.

The results show association rather than proof of causation, but this gives us far stronger evidence than simply asking whether someone felt better after a session.

More restoration.
More regulation.
More resilience.

Address

Yokine, WA

Website

http://schoolofbreathscience.com/, http://www.martinmcphilimey.com/

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